The Academic Minute for 2019.05.06-05.10

The Academic Minute from 05.06 – 05.10

Monday, May 6th
Peter Fox – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Data Set Anaylsis
Peter Fox is a Tetherless World Constellation Chair and Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Fox also directs the Insitution-wide interdisciplinary Information Technology and Web Science program. Previously, he was Chief Computational Scientist at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and before that a research scientist at Yale University. Fox has a B.Sc. (hons) and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (including physics and computer science) from Monash Univsersity. His research and education agenda covers the fields of data science and analytics, ocean and environmental informatics, computational logic, semantic Web, cognitive bias, semantic data frameworks, and solar and solar-terrestrial physics.

Tuesday, May 7th
Richard Gross – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Recyclable By Design
Professor Gross received his Ph.D. from ‘Brooklyn Poly’ (Polytechnic University) working on Polymer Stereochemistry (synthetic chemistry) and then performed postdoctoral research with Robert Lenz at UMASS Amherst on the synthesis/properties of polyhydroxyalkanoates (i.e. bacterial polyesters).

Wednesday, May 8th
Miki Amitay – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Expanding Wind Energy
Michael Amitay, James L. Decker ’45 Endowed Chair in Aerospace Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is an internationally recognized expert for his research on active and passive flow control techniques and how that can be applied to airplanes, wind turbines, building, and many other engineering systems. He serves as the director of the Center for Flow Physics and Control at Rensselaer, which houses a state-of-the-art wind tunnel used to develop tools to improve the safety and performance of aircrafts and vehicles, improve the construction and function of buildings, and expand the use of wind turbines.

Thursday, May 9th
Juergen Hahn – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Using Big Data To Evaluate Autism Treatments
Juergen Hahn is the department head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in addition to holding an appointment in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering. He received his Diploma degree in engineering from RWTH Aachen, Germany, in 1997, and his MS and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair for Process Systems Engineering at RWTH Aachen, Germany, before joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2003 and moving to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2012. His research interests include systems biology and process modeling and analysis with over 130 peer-reviewed publications in print. Dr. Hahn is a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship (1995/96), received the Best Referee Award for 2004 from the Journal of Process Control, the CPC 7 Outstanding Contributed Paper Award in 2006, was named Outstanding Reviewer by the journal Automatica in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2010 CAST Outstanding Young Researcher, and has been elected as an AIMBE fellow in 2013. He served on the IEEE CSS Board of Governors in 2016 and has been a CACHE Trustee since 2014. He is currently serving as associate editor for the journals Control Engineering Practice, Processes, and the Journal of Process Control.

Friday, May 10th
Qiang Wu – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Female CFO’s Are More Risk Averse
Qiang Wu’s current research interests include tax avoidance, accounting conservatism, debt contracting, earnings quality, auditing quality, corporate governance, financial analysts, and corporate social responsibility. His research works have appeared in premier journals including Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. His works have also been cited by business media including Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, AICPA, Accounting Today, AAA, CFO Magazine, Catalyst, Bankrate.